Well folks, the big winter season shows are quickly
fading into a forgettable past, most of the fly orders have been
filled for now, and we‘ve had some trips afield so far this
season. Some of them were excellent and some, well, we were out
on the stream and that can’t be all bad. Actually I believe
we caught fish every day, even if not that many, and I’ll
take that every time. So now, it is time to sit down and do the
first Rod Rambling Column. I’m not a writer. I’m just
a fisherman. Well, maybe I’m a frustrated writer who loves
to fish and just never got around to writing. There was always
a family with kids, a career, and one too many fish in the way.

This first column will be a little bit about me,
how I think, and how I fish. Future columns will pretty much be
about anything else that comes along, but mostly I hope they will
provide you with some piece of information about the sport that
will make the sport more pleasurable for you. If that means you
catch more fish or understand why you caught a fish, well that’s
even better.

Lefty Kreh coined a phrase some years ago about
the progression of all fly fishermen as they advance in the sport
of fly-fishing. The first phase is the effort to put together
enough of the required skills to catch a fish. Any fish will do
-- stupid or smart, stocked or wild, it does not matter. I have
known some people who were really educated, smart, and intelligent
people who worked at this stage for a number of seasons before
they caught their first trout. I compliment them for sticking
with it. It’s worth every ounce of the effort. The second
phase for most fly fishermen, according to Lefty, is the numbers
game: “I want to catch lots of fish”. Any fish will
do, big or small, to complete this step in a fly fisher’s
development. Depending on how one goes about accomplishing this
feat may or may not require a leap in skill level. The third stage
is to catch big fish consistently. In essence they have become
big fish hunters. As long as you are not fishing in the farther
reaches of the world on regular basis and you have reached this
plateau in the fly-fishing world, then you have reached a plateau
that few obtain and fewer still that understand why. The fourth
phase in Lefty’s progression is the hard fish. These fish
can be big or small but they are usually not stupid. These fish
are the ones that lie at the end of the unreachable cast and the
impossible float. If you can consistently pick off these fish,
you are living in rarified air my friend and you know more than
most. There are only a few fishermen who can claim this position.

In all due respect to Lefty, I would like to add
one more phase to a fly fisherman’s development. When you
reach the point where you have caught all the fish you ever wanted
to, and there were some that were big, and there were some that
were hard, and there were many of the other ones -- some which
hold great memories and some are long forgotten -- but you have
not lost the passion to catch one more, and better yet, you really
enjoy it a thousand times more when you help someone else catch
that next fish...that is when you have moved into my last phase
in a fly fisher’ life cycle.

Yes, it’s true some people never progress
very far into this hierarchy, but that’s OK if that’s
all they’re looking for from the sport. You don’t
have to become the reincarnation of Lefty or anyone else for that
matter. That's the great thing about fly-fishing. It is a feel-good
sport once one gets beyond the very beginning novice stages. There
is so much about this sport that fishermen can pick which aspect
of the sport they like, and that’s what they do, and that’s
where they generally stay just because they like it and it feels
good. The greatest example of this is the dry fly purist. They
like to see the fly floating, usually down stream to them, and
the trout rise to take it. There is this little adrenalin rush
that goes with that sequence and it hooks a lot of people (no
pun intended). Yes, we all know in time that there are varying
levels of ‘consciousness' within the realm of the dry fly
purist: “I only fish dry flies”; “I only fish
dry flies to rising fish”; “I only fish dry flies
to rising fish with a cane rod"; and lastly, “I only
fish dry flies with a cane rod over wild rising fish”. So
it is that someone can become fixated at some very sophisticated
spots within any given level of the sport and they can become
very good at what they do. The problem becomes that the fisherman
can end up expending a lot of energy with very little in results.
The question becomes: are you fishing or practicing your casting?
It’s all in what feels good.

That would not be my case, however. I grew up in
a family of fly fishers. My grandfather guided the rich and the
famous from New York City on the Ausable River in NY. In the 1930’s
those people would summer in Lake Placid. It was the Vale of its
time. However, there was no purist in the family. The family was
very much a poor working class family trying to survive the depression
and trout were food on the table. Whatever it took to catch them
was fair game, as long as it was on a fly rod...and sometimes
not on a fly rod. The usual method was a number of the old gaudy
wet flies fished down stream with a lift at the end of the float
and, yes, there were any number of times when the terminal tackle
was the tried and true garden hackle. It wasn’t that we
didn’t fish dry flies, because we did, and they produced
a lot of good fish. It was just that wet flies produced more and
bigger fish. There is an obvious conclusion to be made here. So,
it was: I would grow up with an intense love to fish for trout
and actually catch them. If that meant that I should fish dry
flies when the hatch is there, then that is what I would do. If
there were not a lot of fish on the surface, I would fall back
to fishing underwater. Even when there were a lot of fish on the
top of the water, I was just as apt to continue fishing underwater.

I don’t fish the gaudy old wet flies anymore
and I’m not talking about the Tuck Cast and a high stick
short drift. That’s for the beginner nymph fisherman. It’s
easy to get stuck with that approach to underwater fishing because
it’s easy to teach and effective, but it’s the brain
dead approach to nymph fishing that turns everybody off in time.
The real nymph fisherman will eventually go beyond that to a higher
level. The skill level is infinitely harder but more rewarding.
The float is just as demanding as a dry fly float and detecting
the strike requires a finiteness that many good fishermen never
develop. Over and above all that, the big fish and the harder
fish are generally glued to the bottom. There is a biological
reason for that and we’ll get around to talking about that
in later columns. But for now, if you want to be a big fish hunter
learn to fish on the bottom. You see when the kids are on the
surface rocking and rolling mom and dad as well as grandma and
grandpa are either dining or finished dining underneath with half
the effort.

And so it goes folks, over the years I have tried
every aspect of the sport. I fell in and out of love with most
of them. The one I like the most is catching fish. You can expend
an undue amount of energy fishing where the fish aren’t
just because it feels good. I almost always defer to fishing underwater
unless there is a good reason to fish on top. I’ve always
seen no value in practicing your casting when you are trying to
catch fish. What I really like to do, however, is help someone
catch fish when everybody else is struggling. In that sense, I
like to think there are very few people, no matter what level
they're at, for whom I can’t provide some insight into sport
of the fish we chase.

I welcome all comments on any of the subjects in
the column. I may or may not agree with you and you may not agree
me, but that’s one other thing that makes the sport so great
-- there is plenty of room for disagreement within the sport.
It doesn’t make either one of us right or wrong. It might
make both of us better fishermen and, just maybe, we will feel
good about different aspects of the sport.

Craig

BTW; here’s some food for thought. It’s
not the big things that you learn to do in this sport that will
catch fish, but the little adjustments on the big things you have
learned.